The Age Of Desire: A Novel Part 17

"Two old folks on holiday," Morton says.

"Must . . . see. . . . the . . . sights!" she pants. At the top, they find themselves deliciously alone. The castle towers catch the April wind with a harmonic whistle. Early flowers, violets and woodc.o.c.k orchids ruffle the bases of the rustic old structures. He picks a fat fragrant violet and slides it through the b.u.t.tonhole of her shirtwaist. She touches it with delight.

"I've never been here," he says.

"It's wonderful," she declares, knowing that anything would seem wonderful to her today. All the clouds between them seem to have parted. And the sweetness has blessedly returned. They walk the perimeter of the ruin. Morton holds Edith's hand as she balances along a line of mortared stones that once were part of a wall. Ducking under an old doorway, they find themselves within a reverberating silo-like expanse.

"Hallooo there," he calls.

"Hallooo there," she repeats.

"Ah, see," he laughs. "The perfect echo." He laughs aloud and indeed his laughter is multiplied. They peer up into the furnacelike structure, and as their eyes adjust, they see that windows from upper stories send down faint beams of light, but not enough to warm them. Edith shivers. He takes her into his arms.

"Mine," he whispers and holds her against his chest. She can feel his heart beating against her own through his clothing. His hands slip beneath her wraps and study the line of her waist, then ride back up to her bosom, cupping each breast. A sensation so exquisite it makes her gasp.

"Ah, so there is someone alive in there," he whispers. He pushes her stole from her shoulders and it drops carelessly to the stones, but she is hardly aware, focused on his hands, which radiate a special power. He tweaks her nipples through the fabric of her bodice. Blood rushes to them, and she knows they are changing form, blooming like flowers, pressing forward into his teasing fingers. Not once in her life has she ever felt this quickening, this ripening, this surge of feeling. That night in the library with Walter, she felt something. A longing. But this is so much more. This is what women know that she has never known! This is what Anna de Noailles celebrates! No one has touched her like this. No one.

"Don't think," he whispers. "Just feel."

"Morton . . ."

He brings his lips to hers, parting them with his tongue. Feeling. Just feeling. Not thinking! She is drawn to search the soft insides of his lips with her own tongue. She can hardly bear the satiny sweetness she finds within. They have kissed deeply before, but she has never given back. How extraordinary it feels to give! At last, to want! He sprinkles light kisses along her neck, brushes her ear with his lips, sending fire all through her.

"This is what we've been waiting for," he says, having trouble finding his breath. "What we've needed." He unb.u.t.tons her shirtwaist. As he does, the violet falls. She thinks to stop him and rescue it. But no. He is worrying the layers of her clothing. Like peeling leaves from a cabbage! The lace-encrusted corset cover. The tiny-b.u.t.toned chemise.

"But here, Morton?" she asks. "What if someone else arrives?"

"Just this," he says. "Let me. I must . . ."

He pushes her farther into the darkness. The walls give off a smell of old smoke and damp earth. Finally freeing one breast into his hands, he holds it like a precious treasure. How round and fruitlike it looks in the dusky light, cupped by the elegant beringed fingers of both his hands, her nipple a perfect coral rosebud. He leans down and kisses it and accepts the hard nub into his mouth, his tongue caressing round and round. A sound leaks from her throat, so sudden and unexpected she wonders if it's coming from someone else.

He lifts out her other breast, still caressing the first. If he hadn't, she would have done it for him. How hungry she is to have him kiss it too, to feel his tongue anoint and tease her nipple. More than twenty years of privation, of dull despair melt from her, leaving her throbbing and damp and aching.

And then she hears voices. Coming up the hill, it seems.

"No!" she utters.

"No?" he asks.

"Someone's coming!"

Laughter, voices. Quite a few voices. She turns from the doorway and struggles to hide her b.r.e.a.s.t.s beneath her chemise, to resettle her corset, to b.u.t.ton her lacy cache-corset, to fasten her shirtwaist. She wants to cry.

When she turns back, Morton looks mussed and annoyed. He pulls a cigarette from his silver case and sets it between his lips, watching her. His face is blotched with color. She feels as though her own lips are burning. She pats at her hair, uncertain how she must look.

"Maybe they won't come in."

Morton shrugs. "What if they do? You look fine. You're not a marked woman yet."

Edith shivers and retrieves her stole from the ground, shakes it off. And she lifts the violet. Somehow in their moment of pa.s.sion, it's been stepped on. The purple petals have been crushed to grapey juice. She drops it and watches it fall limply to the stones. She is struck by how distant Morton seems. Having felt like one single being for a glorious moment, she can hardly bear the distance! If only he would touch her. Or take her hand. Or smile. Instead, he offers her a cigarette, and she accepts it, finding comfort in the distraction. The shivering inside doesn't want to stop, even with the hot, calming draw of the smoke.

He must note it because he gestures for her to follow him outside. "Come on," he says. "Let's sit in the sun."

They step out of the same door they entered what seems like hours ago. Sunlight is flooding the gra.s.sy s.p.a.ce beyond the castle, warming the castle walls. Morton settles onto a white stone doorstep polished by a thousand years of footfall and holds out a hand for Edith to join him. In the distance they see their intruders, a band of local boys, laughing and slapping each other's shoulders, tossing stones down the hill and at each other. Perhaps they never would have entered the castle structure after all. Edith's heart is still beating as though she were in the path of a train. She feels she will never be the same.

Knee to knee, hand in hand-oh, how happy she is that he's taken her hand-they bask in the piping sun.

"Tell me," he says finally. "Are you happy?" He does want to be close. He does have feelings for her! How could she have doubted?

"I didn't know I could feel this way," she whispers. Morton brings her fingers to his lips and kisses them.

"It's just the beginning," he says. "Maybe those fellows are right. Maybe one can awaken desire in a woman. I thought it a myth, like unicorns."

"I am your unicorn," she says.

Glancing at his watch, he frowns. "Time seems to have gone mad," he says. "It's nearly one. Aren't you hungry?" She nods. "We'll eat somewhere in town, then walk in the forest before we go back."

"What's it called? La Foret de Rambouillet? We could get lost in the forest like Hansel and Gretel. I wish we never had to go back."

"I wish that every night in my dreams," he says. "Come on. Even unicorns must eat."

If Edith has known joy, it has never felt like this. For this sensation is a mixture of ecstasy and misery she could never have foreseen. She tries to shake off the latter, but it simply won't retreat. Having tasted just a sip of the nectar, Edith is ever more aware that soon it will be gone. It is early April. By the end of May, she will be on an ocean liner heading to the United States. But she must enjoy the journey. It is all she has, all she may ever have.

A note comes almost every day now. It is brought in on my breakfast tray with other letters, and there is the delicious moment of postponement, when one leaves it unopened while one pours the tea, just in order to savourer longer the joy that is coming! Ah, how I see in all this the instinctive longing to pack every moment of my present with all the wasted, driven-in feeling of the past. How I h.o.a.rd and tremble over each incident and sigh! I am like a hungry beggar who crumbles up the crust he has found in order to make it last longer! . . . And then comes the opening of the letter, the slipping of the little silver knife under the flap (which one would never tear!), the first glance to see how many pages there are, the second to see how it ends, and then the return to the beginning, the breathless first reading, the slow lingering again over each phrase and each word, the taking possession, the absorbing of them one by one, and finally the choosing of the one that will be carried in one's thoughts all day, making an exquisite accompaniment to the dull prose of life. . . . Sometimes I think the moment of reading the letter is the best of all-I think that till I see you again, and then, when you are there, and my hands are in yours and my soul is in my hands, then what gray ghosts the letters all become! . . .

Edith knows that happiness is as rare and slight and fragile a thing as a Bernardaud teacup. One unfortunate tap can shatter it to useless shards, never to be drunk from again. For years, she's sipped life from an ugly earthenware bowl. There was no pleasure in drinking from it. But no matter how often she dropped it, it did not break. In some ways, that was easier, for there was nothing at risk. Now that she's held such blinding bliss in her hand, can she ever go back to supping from that heavy, ugly vessel?

After her honeyed Sat.u.r.day with Morton, Edith wakes from the dream of such rare happiness giddy and oddly nervous, lost in all but the simplest conversations, unable to read a word on a page (except for his gorgeous, wonderful letters-he writes full letters now, not just pet.i.ts bleus), or work on her own writing with any momentum. Her writing time is consumed by lingering moments of blind staring, trying to recapture the rapture of their prismatic day together. And as the days of the week pa.s.s, she finds her joy exacts a toll.

I am a little humbled, a little ashamed, to find how poor a thing I am, how the personality I had molded into such strong firm lines has crumbled to a pinch of ashes in this flame! For the first time in my life I can't read. . . . I hold the book in my hand and I see your name all over the page! I always thought I would know how to bear suffering better than happiness, and so it is. . . . I am stupefied, aneantie. . . . There lies the profound difference between a man and woman. What enlarges and enriches life for one eliminates everything but itself for the other. Now and then I say to myself, "Je vais me ressaisir"-mais saisir quoi? This pinch of ashes that slips through my fingers? Oh, my free, proud, secure soul, where are you? What were you to desert me like this. . . .

Anna, also, feels unmoored. Without Teddy to care for, worry about, she too has lost her focus. She can envision his face as she types Edith's business letters, as she walks the streets of Paris. She carries this emptiness wherever she goes. It becomes a bubble through which she sees a faded world. The gay cafes of Boulevard St. Germain and the beautiful quiet parks near Les Invalides are softened and altered by this sad gray lens. She waits anxiously each day to hear if he has landed in the United States, whether he has arrived at Hot Springs and if the warm, flowing waters have given him relief at last. She even thinks of writing him herself. To remind him why he must get better: so that he can be there for the unveiling of the swine house at The Mount. So he can introduce her to dear fat Lawton.

Once long ago when Edith wasn't well and she was in Europe, Teddy wrote Anna a letter. He addressed her as Miss Anna. His handwriting was simple and blocky like a child's. His spelling was execrable. She remembers he told her that he was concerned because Edith "don't seem like herself these days," utilizing for one of the first times that glib, ungrammatical way of speaking that irks her. That letter sits in a box on the top shelf of a cupboard in the house on Park Avenue, where Anna has stowed a cache of Edith's letters too. She wishes she had Teddy's short missive now, so she could trace her finger along the curls of his words to her.

These days, when she asks Edith if she has heard anything about Teddy, she finds her in a softer and more amiable mood. Edith smiles at Anna more and her voice is light and generous, as it used to be, long ago when she was a wonderful, odd little girl. In those sweet years, Edith thought Anna the greatest authority on life and literature, the only one who truly understood her. Anna wishes she could understand Edith now. But how can she when nothing Edith does makes sense? When she chooses a bounder like Fullerton over a good-hearted, loyal, upstanding man like Teddy Wharton? And Edith's feelings for Fullerton can't be ignored. A woman in love is an ostentatious thing. If Anna is in Edith's room when her breakfast tray arrives, Edith's hazel eyes alight on the note that always seems to accompany her breakfast like a hawk landing on a mouse. She never opens his letters in front of Anna, but Anna knows it's her cue to excuse herself, for from the moment the letter arrives, Edith seems to go deaf.

"Do you think she's gotten herself entangled with him?" Gross asks Anna with a look of dread when Cook tells them Edith is having lunch with Fullerton again. "I mean in the worst sort of way. She seems utterly changed."

"I wish it wasn't so," Anna tells her, biting her lip.

"Can't you talk to her, warn her?" Though she is the more outgoing of the two, Gross is never one to confront her mistress.

"What could I possibly say more than I have said? What?"

They both know through Cook that Edith and Fullerton have gone on an outing to some far-flung locale and disappeared for hours by themselves. And there are those lunches a few times a week. If Edith weren't acting so fluttery, Anna might not pay attention to it. She's always had male friends-from the great Henry James to much younger fellows with keen eyes and nervous laughs. But this one is different. Anna's known Edith too long not to be sure of it.

One day, after luncheon, a letter arrives for Anna from Kate Thorogood, Sally Norton's housekeeper. Anna looks forward to Kate's monthly missives. They are always newsy, wise, full of quotes from poetry and thoughtful sentences. When Anna and Edith visit Sally Norton at Shady Hill, Anna spends as much time with Kate as possible.

Kate's letter tells of worry over Sally's bronchitis and the miserable wet weather they've had to bear this spring in Cambridge. She writes of people that Anna's been introduced to in the past, and then, surprisingly, her letter mentions Morton Fullerton.

Since Miss Norton has said that Mrs. Wharton is now great friends with Will Fullerton, I suppose you know about his odd engagement. It's rather the talk around here. At first, I heard through my friends that there was quite an uproar in his family over it. He went down to Bryn Mawr last summer and just up and asked the girl to marry him. But now his family is telling everyone that a marriage will soon take place, and his mother is planning his wedding breakfast.

The facts of it are rather more than I can fathom. I mean, to be engaged to one's own sister! Perhaps I'm just not modern enough, but it makes me gasp. Of course, she is not really his sister but his cousin. Still, they were raised together as siblings (as you and I were with our cousins) and I can't help but find it an outrage. Can you imagine marrying one of your cousins? Do you know if Mrs. Wharton is invited to the wedding?

The letter begins to shake in Anna's hand and Anna feels as though she's holding a lit explosive. Her heart is racing, her mouth is so dry she can't swallow. Could it possibly be true? Fullerton engaged . . . and to his sister! Why, just a few weeks ago Edith dined with Fullerton's sister, didn't she? Edith and she talked about how remarkable it was that the girl taught college . . . at Bryn Mawr. But she didn't say a word about an engagement. Could she possibly know?

Anna heads straight for the kitchen, which, happily, is empty. Too late for luncheon, too early for dinner preparation. Rather than seek out Catherine, who will only laugh at her when she tells her what she has in mind, she heads straight toward the silver cupboard and pulls out the largest, most tarnished tray she can find. Anna thinks it must be ten pounds. Its repousse rim boasts oranges and apples, artichokes and corn cobs. And in between them are crevices as deep as a woman's little finger is long: all nearly black. The V in the center is elaborately carved. Anna scoops the tarnish cream in a great greedy blob onto her cloth, s.p.a.ckles it onto the V and begins to polish. She rubs so hard her wrist soon burns.

If she tells Edith that Fullerton is engaged to his sister, Edith will think it just a clumsy plot to discredit Fullerton. Because who could ever believe such madness?

Eliot Gregory would probably love to be the bearer of such shocking gossip. Let someone else break the information to Edith.

Anna stands in front of Edith at her writing desk, her hands clasped, feeling all energy and intent drain from her. When she came into the study, Edith was writing a letter, and Anna's intrusion made her turn it upside down on her desk with childlike furtiveness.

"What on earth is the matter with you, Anna?" Edith asks. "Just say what you've come to say." Her voice is not harsh, her eyes not truly angry. But her brusque words send Anna even deeper into the mora.s.s of silence that provoked them.

"There's something I need to tell you," she says to Edith. "But maybe it would be best to come back later." She steps backward toward the door.

"Is this about Teddy?" Edith asks. "Because I've heard from him, just this morning. He's arrived in Hot Springs."

"Is he there at last? I'm so glad." She feels a breathtaking weight lifted from her, imagining Teddy bathed in warm, soothing waters.

"Of course, there's no word yet, but I have great hopes they can help him."

"Oh, I dearly hope so. He's so despondent, in so much pain."

"Yes, so he tells me again and again," Edith says. It hurts Anna to hear how dismissively she speaks of her husband. "What did you come to say, Tonni?"

Again, this morning, Edith didn't leave Anna a single page to type. Not one. And Gross said she didn't touch a bite of her luncheon. She looks high in color too. Keyed up.

"I've heard something," Anna finds the courage to say. "About Mr. Fullerton. I didn't want to tell you, but I decided you shouldn't . . . wouldn't want to hear it from others."

Edith's eyes fly to Anna's face. "What about him?"

"I got a letter from Kate Thorogood. Do you remember her?"

"Kate . . . Thorogood?"

"Miss Norton's housekeeper."

"Oh, your friend Kate. She wrote about Mr. Fullerton?"

"She said that he's . . ." Anna looks at her shoes, which need polishing. When she is done with this misery, she can polish her shoes. Then scrub the shoe polish from her fingernails. She would like to scrub the very skin from her hand. Edith will hate her when she reveals what she knows. Why did she embark on this terrible path?

"He's what?"

"He's engaged to be married."

"What?" Edith bursts out laughing. "Mr. Fullerton? That's absurd. To whom? To whom does Miss Thorogood think he's engaged?"

"To his sister."

Every ounce of color drains from Edith's cheeks.

"That is not a funny joke."

"I didn't think so either. His sister was adopted by his family. She's a cousin, in fact. And last summer when he was at Bryn Mawr, he asked her to marry him."

"That's . . . why, that's impossible! He came to The Mount right after Bryn Mawr. He didn't breathe a word." Edith's nostrils flare.

"His parents objected at first. But now they are telling everyone there will be a wedding. Kate asked if-seeing as you're such good friends with Mr. Fullerton-you're invited to the wedding."

"There's a misunderstanding."

"I hope so. It did seem odd to me. . . ."

"Odd? It's grotesque!"

"I was just going to write her back and say there had been some mistake. But I thought I should speak to you first, in case you knew something."

"If he were engaged, I'd know," Edith says. Her voice is cold with confidence, but her eyes betray her. They dart about the room, full of question.

"I'll go now," Anna says.

"You don't like Mr. Fullerton, do you? Why?"

"I hardly know him."

"But you've already told me that you don't approve of our relationship."

"I merely said that it would be good if you spent less time with him-when Mr. Wharton was here, it upset him."

"The simple truth is," Edith's hazel eyes narrow and, when they catch the light, flash yellow. "The simple truth is you don't want me to be happy because you're not."

Edith could not have hurt Anna more if she'd slapped her across the face. The words hang in the air like gunpowder, sulfurous, volatile. Anna tries to find her composure, but the pain addles her. And when she does speak, each word comes out on its own, slowly, devastatingly. "All I've ever wanted is happiness for you," Anna says.

When Edith was little, Anna called her Herz. Heart, in German. Edith used to sign her letters to Anna "Herz." All these years, Edith has held Anna's heart. But where is Edith's heart?

"And you think my happiness will ever come from an imbecile like Teddy Wharton?"

"Please! Please don't call him that. You can't see who he is anymore. You've forgotten how good he is."

"I can't bear being with a man as flat as a piece of paper. . . ."

"If you just gave him some sign you still loved him . . ."

"I never loved him."